


Marked

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Blood, Gen, Gunshot Wounds, Mortality, Spoilers for Ch. 59, Stitches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-13
Updated: 2014-08-13
Packaged: 2018-02-12 23:00:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2127681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>If she lived through this whole thing, she’d watch him die before the end of it. She was suddenly surer of that than she was of anything else in this life, save maybe that the sun would rise in the morning.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Marked

Sasha leaned against the barn’s rear wall and closed her eyes. From the other side of it she could hear, distant and muffled, Armin retching and whatever he last ate splashing in the grass.

_Not as easy as ye thought, eh?_

Her mouth twitched with guilt. If Armin hadn’t done what he did, Jean wouldn’t be sitting across from her now with his knees drawn up, staring into space. She didn’t know if she could have done it herself.

But maybe it was good, that he knew there was a price to it. She wondered if Eren or Mikasa ever learned that.

She heard their voices through the wall, Mikasa’s and Armin’s, though not the words they spoke. After Mikasa’s voice trailed off in uncharacteristic uncertainly, a quavering wail of anguish broke from Armin. Sasha fought the urge to slide down the wall and bury her head in her hands.

She wished she had something else to occupy those hands. _Idle hands take up evil work,_ her father had said to her more than once. After they’d come into the barn and Jean had sat down, she’d touched his shoulder gently, but he’d given his head a single emphatic shake and she’d left him alone. Connie didn’t seem to need help tending the horses. He probably was taking more comfort from them than they were from him.

“Sir.” She raised her head to address her commanding officer, who stood in the center of the small, dusty space. “Want me to go out and find us a hare for supper?”

“No,” Levi said sharply. “I don’t want anyone further away from this barn for the night than the stream to the east, and only for water. We can get by on our rations for now.” He looked squarely at her. “I have something else for you to do.” He began to unbutton his shirt.

 _What the—?_ She stared at him. “Sir?”

“You’ve got steady hands, steadier than anyone’s right now except Mikasa, and I need her on sentry duty. You know how to clean and stitch up a wound?”

Every one of the sparse collection of souls that made up Dauper knew how to clean and stitch up a wound. And set a bone, and make a poultice, and pick and boil herbs for tonics. The women among them delivered one another’s babies. Even if there’d been a country doctor to make rounds on horseback among them, how would any of them have paid the fees?

“Yeah,” she said sullenly, feeling resistant to adding the _sir_ this time. She wouldn’t go so far as to disobey the order. But she had no desire to lay her hands on this man, who a day before had roughed up Historia — _Historia,_ for God’s sake! — then announced to all of them his willingness to commit mass murder if he had to. The lesson driven home to her earlier in the day, that they’d have to kill to survive, didn’t make her any gladder to lend him a hand. Less, actually. She reminded herself with a grim resignation that if Levi took ill and died from the wound, the rest of them would be much easier prey for the MPs.

He inclined his head in the opposite direction, either not noticing or ignoring the insubordinate address. “There’s a first-aid kit of sorts in the loft, buried in the hay. Vinegar, needle and thread, tinctures, some other shit. After Erwin ordered us to put the coup in motion, Hange sent her squad around to leave things we might need in a few different hideouts.”

Wearily, Sasha peeled herself away from the wall, crossed the barn floor, and scaled the loft ladder. It was late enough in the year that the fodder was piled high, but, as her father had teased her on many occasions, she could’ve found the proverbial needle at the bottom of it all if there’d been a nut or berry stuck on the end of it. And a first-aid kit was bigger than that.

After a few minutes of pawing through the hay near the southern wall, the edges of her fingers struck something made of pine that wasn’t a floor beam. The light wasn’t good enough up there to check the contents of the small box, but what else could it be?

“Got it,” she called out, then descended the ladder with the kit under her arm.

Levi sat on a crate, his shirt open. “Help me take this off. The threads are stuck to the wound. You’ll do less damage than I would.”

Damage to the shirt? Little as they could afford to waste anything now, the thing was on its way to the ragpile, what with all the holes, blood, and overall grime. But she merely said, “Yes, sir,” and sat the kit down on the floor beside the crate.

She’d never been physically closer to Levi than a few seats away at the dinner table or passing him in a hallway. He usually smelled of soap — the pricey kind, a man’s soap with a nice woody smell to it, not the harsh stuff her mother used to make out of tallow and ashes. Just now, he smelled of rank sweat, and also of blood and gunpowder and horses. Like any other soldier.

“Which wound, sir?” There was a gash on his face that’d need patching, too, and that probably wouldn’t be the end of it.

“Right shoulder,” he said tersely.

“Raise that arm for me, please, sir?”

His mouth tightened as he did her bidding. She gently pinched and pulled at the crimson-soaked, powder-blasted cloth around his shoulder in various places to see where it would come loose and where it wouldn’t. 

“Sir, might be better to cut out the spot, patch the shirt up later.”

He snorted. “Shirt’s done for anyway. Hange’s men left some extra ones around here too. Do what you need to.”

“Yes, sir.”

There was a small pair of shears in the kit. Working them steadily and slowly, Sasha clipped a wide, looping path in the fabric around the wound. She tugged gently on the edges of the hole she’d made, ascertaining that everything stuck to Levi had been snipped away from most of the shirt. Satisfied, she stepped back and said, “Try to take the shirt off now, sir.”

His mouth tightened as he raised both shoulders and thrust his arms back, but he shrugged easily out of the tattered shirt, then tossed it to the barn floor. The condition of the garment notwithstanding, it was something she expected to see Jean or Connie do, not the fastidious captain of the Survey Corps. Naked to the waist, he straightened his back and gave her an expectant look.

 _He’s a well-formed man, I’ll give him that,_ she thought.

He was also a well-scarred man. The broad, knotted furrow in the crook of his neck opposite her was no less fearsome for having paled with age. Whoever’d dealt it to him had to have been trying to behead him. Another, somewhat fresher scar bit deeply into his left bicep, and still more ran down that forearm. She’d venture to say he’d soon be sporting one on his left cheek. And the skin stretched over the hard muscles of his chest, belly, and back mapped out a life lived by the gun, the blade, and the fist. You didn’t have to know the gossip about how he made his living before he joined the Survey Corps in order to read it.

She grasped the edge of the patch stuck to his shoulder wound and tugged at it lightly. “Can’t really see how deep it’s stuck, sir. I’m gonna just yank it free. Might want to brace yourself.”

He rolled his eyes. “Just do it already.”

She tore the patch away as if she were pulling her blade out of a titan’s nape and preparing to strike again. She didn’t feel _gratified,_ exactly, when Levi’s eyes widened and he went a shade of white she didn’t think living humans ever turned. She didn’t feel bad about it, either.

No fibers seemed to remain stuck in the wound, and fresh blood oozed slowly from beneath where they had come loose. Surrounding the spot was a field of crusted blood, raw-churned flesh, and powder burns. It didn’t smell good, but it didn’t smell foul, either, and she spied no pus. The flow of blood wasn’t worrisome, particularly as it was above his heart.

From the kit Sasha took several clean squares of linen, as well as a little flask that turned out to be full of the promised vinegar. Her nostrils twitched as she uncapped it, and she saw his do the same. Warning enough, she guessed. She upended the flask against one of the cloths, then began to swipe it gently over the wound. His face whitened further — she didn’t know how so pale a man had that much color to lose from his cheeks — but he sat absolutely still.

The wetness of the vinegar helped loosen some of the crusted blood. By the time Sasha patted it all dry with a clean cloth she could see the edges of the wound. It would take a little patience to sew up, there being so little slack to Levi’s skin, but it wouldn’t be impossible. What concerned her more was the bullet. She’d once removed an arrow from a man’s leg, but it was easier to pull out a projectile with a shaft than one without.

“Sir, I can’t tell how deep the shot must’ve gone, ‘specially in this light. There’s tweezers in the kit but I don’t know as I can get the thing out of you.”

“Don’t even try,” he said harshly, his volume rising slightly.

“You sure, sir?”

“Very sure. For all I know the bullet’s not in there anymore — I can still use this arm. You dig around, tear shit up, that might not be true anymore.”

“All right, sir.”

She rummaged in the kit again. There was a hard, linen-wrapped lump that turned out to be a spool of thread, and beneath it was a card of sorts through which three needles had been stuck. Not the fishhook-like needles a proper medic would use, to get down to the thick, tough underskin so as to close a wound up tight. Small, slender sewing needles. Same as they used in Dauper.

She chose one and, out of caution, dipped both its end and the end of the thread into a capful of vinegar before threading the eye and tying it off. Then she played out a generous length of thread, snipped it off, knotted the end, bunched it all up, and doused it as well. Finally she wiped both her hands on a freshly soaked cloth.

“About to start stitching it up, sir,” she said mildly, wondering if he’d scoff at her for warning him again. He didn’t acknowledge her words at all, and she took that as acquiescence.

The first stitch, the anchor, would be the hardest. Best to get it over with. With the fingers of her left hand she pinched up as much skin as she could, which wasn’t much, just beyond the upper tip of the wound. With her right hand she drove the needle head-on into it. The nearer corner of Levi’s mouth tightened as she drew the thread through the heretofore intact skin.

She wove it back through the same spot, keeping it as close as possible to the first throw, then tied off the knot with a bit of slack to it. Old Mrs. Weber had taught her that trick, in case a wound swelled up and the stitches threatened to burst.

The next stitch was to the wound itself. The rule of thumb Sasha’d always heard was _thirteen millimeters from the edge, thirteen millimeters apart_. Hard to eyeball that, especially in so little light, but she hewed as close as she could to it as she drew the needle again and again through the edges of skin pinched between the fingers of her other hand. She moved slowly, exactingly, trying to get the one side to mirror the other, slowing down further and loosening the thread when Levi’s skin puckered. Under her hands, he rippled with the tension of trying to remain still through piercing after piercing of his flesh. Suddenly she was glad she wasn’t trying to drive a fishhook through muscle tensed harder than stone.

When the barn door banged open she kept her head down, not wanting to lose her place in her handiwork. Only one set of footsteps entered. She recognized the tread and was unsurprised to hear, a few seconds later, Mikasa say quietly, “Change of guard.”

“Okay.” It was the first thing Sasha’d heard out of Jean since Armin had shot his would-be killer down. He paused, then asked, “Where’s Armin?”

It was Mikasa’s turn to pause. “...Still outside.”

“...I see.”

There was shuffling and rustling, then a heavier tread coming toward her and Levi again. The barn door closed a little more softly this time. From where Jean had been sitting a moment before, she heard a quiet sigh.

Perhaps five minutes afterward, she tied off the final anchor knot and snipped the thread with the little shears. “All done, sir.”

Levi tipped his head backward, eyes closed, exhaling deeply. The sun hadn’t quite set, and its last rays filtered into the barn through the sundry holes in the roof and walls without dispelling any of the gloom within. The weak light settled only on the highest points of Levi’s uptilted face. Darkness ate into the hollows of his eyes and cheeks like rats eating away the flesh of a corpse.

A finger of ice touched the top of her spine, just below her nape, and Sasha stood up ramrod-straight.

Since she’d joined the military she’d thought little on all the old ghost tales that had swirled around her as a child in the woods. The living world was full of horrors enough. But now she recalled one such tale in particular: the Mark of Death on the face of one very much alive. It was a thing apart from the sickly pallor and raling breaths of the deathbed. Just a fleeting moment in which the flesh seemed to fall away and you could perceive the skull under the healthy skin. 

When she was maybe seven, maybe eight, she’d asked her father about it. _Trick of the light, no more’n that,_ he’d grunted. _Don’t let the old women fill yer head with foolish things to be a-skairt of._ Sasha, who took after him in her general indifference to the otherworldly, had thought it sounded like a reasonable explanation. 

It didn’t now. Not even after Levi raised his head again, blinking, and the unearthly shadows had fled the angles and planes of his face.

What remained of humanity believed the man who sat before her to be nigh-on immortal. Levi dealt death; Levi cheated death. It didn’t take a prophet to tell he wouldn’t die in his bed of old age, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t cheat death a dozen more times, a hundred more times. Maybe all the rest of them would be shot down and he’d be standing over their corpses. But she’d swear to a tribunal, to the Wallists, to anyone who’d listen that he had the Mark on him.

If she lived through this whole thing, she’d watch him die before the end of it. She was suddenly surer of that than she was of anything else in this life, save maybe that the sun would rise in the morning.

When she spoke next, her voice came out strangely solemn. “There’s willow bark in the kit, sir. Let me boil you up a tonic.”

“I don’t fucking need it,” he snapped, with a catch in his voice that gave the lie to what he’d just said.

“Sir, it’s not just for pain. It’s to ward off fever and—” and she’d meant to say _infection_ , but instead of the word she’d learned in training, the old country phrase slipped out instead. “—rot to the flesh.”

For all that he’d remained perfectly still under the needle, Levi now shuddered deeply. She thought she could see a touch of green in his ashen face.

“We’ll start a campfire in here in a bit, after Armin comes back in,” he said. There was no defensiveness or temper in his voice now, just a dull weariness. “Should be safe enough, with the holes in the roof. You can boil the bark over it.”

“Sir,” she said deferentially, setting the contents of the first-aid kit back to rights in the little box.

**Author's Note:**

> [Kinkmeme prompt.](http://snkkink.dreamwidth.org/13546.html?thread=8665066#cmt8665066)
> 
> I had assumed that Levi’s shoulder wound was from a bullet. [Aieika](http://archiveofourown.org/comments/14156469), who looked back over ch. 58, believes that either he was just grazed or he was hit directly by shrapnel or bits of masonry damaged by cannon shot. I’m regretting, somewhat, not having reviewed those action scenes myself once I [learned](https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110117171842AAq7t1t) from the [internet](http://nanowrimo.org/forums/reference-desk/threads/160845) that a bullet wound to the shoulder is usually disabling — and, of course, a hit from one of those hand cannon could have severed his entire arm at the shoulder. But, eh. Let the story stand as it is. :)


End file.
